


there's a soldier's chorus on the other side

by philthestone



Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen, and my daughter amelia is a Good Friend despite her Pining, anyway brave lil toaster has a big squishy heart, get ready for Pain, honestly why do i insist on repeatedly making yakob cry, i blame celeste and jesse forever, timestamp: immediately post defense rests
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-13
Updated: 2016-04-13
Packaged: 2018-06-02 01:25:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6544771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/philthestone/pseuds/philthestone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A month later, they’ll be at a stakeout: eleven pm with the bag of sour gummies being passed between them like clockwork when Jake says, “So I told Sophia I loved her,” into the coldish car air. </p><p>Amy swallows and feels the sugar granules coating the gummie in her hand dig against her skin. “Oh,” she says.</p><p>“And then she dumped me,” he adds, muttered against the fogged up car window, and Amy wonders what <em>different</em> is supposed to mean when they still tell each other everything and a half.</p>
            </blockquote>





	there's a soldier's chorus on the other side

**Author's Note:**

> i should be studying for nutrition instead of posting this oh jeez:  
> \- this is an incoherent mess, forgive me  
> \- i love jake peralta  
> \- i love amy santiago  
> \- i love sophia perez the most oh man  
> \- i especially appreciate how jake legitimately really cared for sophia, and maybe he didn't Love her when he said he did, not as All Encompassing as the Cruise confession, but one of jake's defining character traits is how much he cares about everyone and honestly i don't think its ooc at all to say that he really did love sophia  
> \- i'd love sophia too tbh  
> \- how many times has this kid's heart been broken lmao  
> \- i hate defense rests  
> \- *finger guns*
> 
> title's from hamilton and honestly i don't know why it makes sense but i rly love that line ok
> 
> reviews are me not always writing scenes where jake cries <3

Jake's skin is warm where her fingers press, curled underneath the damp material of his dress shirt. Amy shifts her feet against the tiled floor of the bar, presses them further apart to give herself a more solid center of balance, and eases her partner’s weight against her shoulder.

“Thanks, Hank,” she tells the bartender quietly. Hank’s expression has gone from exasperated to sympathetic. A crease appears between his eyebrows as he looks at Jake, who mumbles, “’M _fine_ ,” at the general direction of the chair opposite to them.

“Take it easy, kid,” says Hank, clapping a hand gently against Jake’s shoulder. “Breakups are shit to deal with, I know.”

Amy’s spent most of the night on her feet, never staying in one seat for long enough. She’s been flitting from conversation to conversation and trying to focus on something other than the moment where Jake fell into her and Charles’s booth, already half drunk, and managed to announce that Sophia had broken up with him. The rush of adrenaline that had accompanied her pleasure at successfully resolving the tension between Charles and Gina had long since petered out, and Amy found suddenly that she had nothing on which to blame the sudden, traitorous swoop in her stomach.

She plays three rounds of pool with Louise from downstairs, watches Rosa’s drink for the three minutes the other woman disappears into the bathroom, and politely asks Terry about Sharon’s pregnancy. Against her will, her shoulders are tense and her heartrate refuses to slow down and, just for that, she feels the guilt roil in her gut, unanticipated.

(She thinks about how Jake had sent her encouraging texts after the mess at the Maple Drip Inn, about how she kept getting Google pics of cute baby animals the whole next day. But that’s her problem, she thinks: Jake did that for her with a clear conscience.)

She’s barely touched her drink but her heart is beating too fast, and she sort of hates that Rosa gave her a knowing look - thick, sculpted eyebrow raised - when Amy’s eyes widened at Jake’s slurred announcement.

(She refuses to acknowledge the fact that she does not trust herself, because admitting to that would be perhaps a bit too much, just now.)

Amy leaves her cocktail mostly full, content to simply admire the colourful liquid in the glass from afar, moving around too much to really get much drinking done. Instead, she focuses on resolutely ignoring the traitorous, renewed panging in her chest and enjoying herself, laughing with Terry and pretending to groan when Louise beats her twice, pretending to be surprised and feigning playful offence when the good-natured accusation of, “Your head’s in the clouds, Santiago!” is thrown out. She catches Rosa, once, sling her arm around Jake’s shoulder at one of the booths, watches as Gina pats his hand twice – thinks, _There, he’s fine_ , and decides to go to the bathroom and take a breather.

She’s not sure why she stays at the bar as long as she does, or how she’s managed to leave three quarters of her drink untouched for this long, considering the feeling she has under her skin – the discomfort in her chest, the confusion building up relentlessly like a hotcold buzz, refusing to let her relax.

(The _whys_ and _hows_ and _they seemed so solid_ and once, once, the quick and bruningstinging _was it my fault?_ – the sort of question that doesn’t come out at all hopeful but horrifying, crippling, anxiety-inducing in its suggestion that she has, through her own fumbling and inability, ruined something for someone else again.)

It’s close to midnight: Charles and Terry and Holt have all headed home; she’s fairly sure Rosa had a late date with Marcus; and Gina had, earlier, announced that Shaw’s wasn’t nearly intense enough for the kind of drunk she needed to get and disappeared, allegedly to grace some of Brooklyn’s nicer clubs with her presence.

She’s not sure why she stays so long at the bar, but she does, and it’s almost half-past midnight when she’s picking her bag up to leave and she feels a tap on her shoulder, turning to face a disgruntled-looking Hank and Jake, barely standing upright on his feet, two steps away from her.

“I had to cut him off,” Hank explains, as Jake mumbles something unintelligible and likely unflattering under his breath. “Before he hurt himself. Girlfriend dumped him, huh?”

“Um,” says Amy, and suddenly all of the things she’s managed to avoid all night are pressing up against the back of her throat, blocking her words. The steady mantra of _he’s fine_ that she’s been unconsciously chanting through the evening falls to pieces in the back of her mind; his eyes are unfocused and his hair mussed, there are stains on his dress shirt, and she can’t begin to imagine where his tie disappeared to. The only thing holding him up on his own two feet is Hank’s burly arm, gripping the underside of Jake’s bicep.

He’s a wreck, and she’s dealt with him being a wreck before, countless numbers of times.

But her stomach still drops out.

“I’ll take him home,” she blurts, her fingers tightening around the strap of her purse, and she tries not to hate that something that used to be so normal and familiar is now unknown territory.

She slides into the driver's seat and there are patches of skin on her arm that are tingling where the damp warmth of Jake’s weight is no longer touching her. His cheek is pressed against the window of the shotgun seat, and Amy lets her thumb curl around the steering wheel as she focuses on the road. There is (as she'd known there would be) a familiarity to the shape of him in her periphery, filling up the space in the passenger’s seat in her car; stakeouts, and roadtrips up and down state, and rides to and from the precinct. Since he sold his car, he’s grabbed rides with her almost every other morning when their shifts coincide, and his grin is ever-present, fingers twiddling with the radio knob on her dashboard that still smells of confectioner’s sugar and dollar-store donuts. 

Amy doesn’t bother pretending that she hasn’t been aware of how much space Jake takes up in her life for _years_ – it’s a packaged deal, working so closely with someone in such a high-risk job, the familiarity and normalcy of sharing more than half of your time and emotional energy and even belongings with another person in exchange for an inherent all-encompassing trust that Amy realizes has at some point solidified itself into her bones without her giving it a second thought. There’s a Jake-shaped space that shines brightly in the nooks and crannies of her existence, a Jake-shaped space that she _knows_ , has known for so long now, will _always_ have her back, and Amy thinks about how naturally their partnership morphed from something that was required of her to accept for the sake of her job to something that she could not imagine her life without.

(She thinks that maybe this is part of what’s been contributing to the buzz of anxiety in her chest all evening. She cannot help but wonder the reasons, can’t help but remember the brightness of Jake’s smile whenever he talked about Sophia Perez, or the way his loudness didn’t seem strained or tired but a thrumming sort of _happy_ that Amy could not help but be grateful for in a way that she rarely ever doubts he would for her, as well.)

Jake’s utterly silent, something that she’s hyperaware of. It contrasts sharply to the gentle twitter of noise that she always experiences when she’s near him – even, in fact, when he’s not actually there, her phone vibrating almost constantly with dumb texts from him at all hours of the day. She wonders if he’s finally passed out, but her eyes catch the small movement of his eyelids, fluttering in the strobe-like coloured lights that are reflecting through the car windshield as they navigate through Brooklyn.

(She remembers his laughing voice in the car on that quiet highway road, teasing and incredibly gentle all at once as he offered her the last gulp of blue soda. 

When she reaches the turn for Jake’s apartment, she doesn’t turn her blinker on and instead drives straight.)

Amy tells herself that the reason they’re at her apartment is because she doesn’t have the energy to carry him up a loft to his room, nor the heart to let him collapse in his living room or something dumb like that, and what kind of partner would she be, anyway, if she did that, she'd be lousy, she'd be a _lousy_ partner, and -

She pulls into her designated parking space and turns the car off, and finally turns to look at him directly.

Jake blinks at her a couple times, his cheek peeling away from the cold, fogged-up window. There’s a patch of pink imprinted on it, complementing the blotchy flush of his face, and Amy pulls the keys out of the ignition and gives an encouraging grin.

“Hey, champ. You think you can walk?”

“Yeah,” says Jake, and his voice comes out funny and cracking. “Yeah, ‘m – sure, lemme jus’ –” He fumbles with his seatbelt, eyebrows creasing as though he’s only just realized that it’s there, and he fails at unclipping it twice before Amy reaches over and does it for him, grabbing her purse from the back seat and moving out to the other side of the car to loop an arm under his shoulders as he stumbles onto the pavement – almost instinct, by this point, which maybe should be weird but really, truly isn’t.

(She wonders why she even _asked_ him if he was okay to walk.)

They make it to the front lobby of her apartment, shivering in the biting February air, stumbling only a few times, and Amy’s thinking of the warm weight she can feel through the gap between her neck and jacket and how she has to let him go when she comes to enter the passcode to get up into the apartment building, her own keys looped through her two fingers. Jake is leaning against the brick wall beside the address board and Amy's brain is telling her that it's a good thing that they're inside and out of the cold, now, because he doesn't have his jacket, _where did his jacket go_ , and her finger is brushing against the number 3 in the code box when she realizes he’s slid down to the floor. His shirt is rumpled, the collar half turned up, one sleeve pushed up against his forearm and the other hanging loose and open, and one of his shirttails has come loose.

It takes her a second to realize he’s crying.

His uncoordinated hands are scrubbing at his blotchy face already in the time it takes her to drop her purse ( _unattended onto the floor_ , she’d have said, disapproving, another time) and ease down onto her knees, hands automatically coming up in front of her because there’s a part of her that’s dealt with crying people before, that’s been _trained_ to deal with crying people before, (and she can still feel the Amy at the bar, the pit of her stomach buzzing with her own confusion, lingering in her subconscious, but it’s shaky enough to be pushed away to the edge of her periphery) that’s automatically listing all the things that she could say and when it’s okay to touch and not to touch and –

 _God, Santiago, your friend was just_ dumped, shrills a voice in her head, and Amy freezes, hands still hovering in front of her. _Stop overthinking, stop being professional, stop –_

“I’m just –” If Jake’s voice was cracking before, it’s splintering in half now, the pieces throbbing with hurt and laced with a pathetic helplessness that makes Amy’s heart suddenly and unexpectedly clench tightly. 

(She's been here before, she thinks. Nearly eight years, now, and how many times has she been handed Jake Peralta's heart almost as an afterthought, worn so heedlessly on his sleeve, to build fortresses around and wrap with duct tape and support in those mornings where it just feels so much easier to just lay face down in bed immobile and the only person who can be convincing enough over text message is her: Amy Santiago with her rule books and too-clean desk and never-ending love for paperwork.

She's seen him cry before, a few times. She's stayed up late sending him emojis because his mom was in the hospital and he texted her first, and it read like he wasn't wholly consious of why he'd texted _her_ above everyone else. She's experienced rom coms and Disney movies and cried through the ending of _Revenge of The Sith_ with him, and she's watched him fumble through unlimited numbers of father's days and break down in the filing room after a three-day grind that ended in finding the body of a six year old girl.)

Amy’s not a sympathetic crier – not at all – but she feels the lump growing in her own throat as Jake takes a stuttering breath and smears the wetness on his cheek with the back of his hand – finally seeming to be too exhausted and hurt and drunk to do anything but completely fall apart. “I’m just, r- _really_ drunk, r’now, ‘m not - G-God, I jus -”

And then he presses his hands to his face and really starts crying, his face crumpling and his shoulders shaking in an erratic sloppy beat and he looks so broken and lost that Amy feels her own voice break in half.

“Jake,” she says, (and wonders how she ever thought, _He’ll be okay_ ). “It’s gonna be okay, Jake. You’re gonna be okay.” He doesn’t respond, so she shifts closer so that they’re shoulder to shoulder, her arm scraping against the brick behind him as it pushes through the gap between his shoulders and the wall. She keeps it there, her knees huddled to her chest, and doesn’t move when he lays his head on her shoulder. She thinks about how many times they have sat like this, shoulder-to-shoulder against a wall, in the seven years she’s known him. Late at night and in the eye-grit hours of the morning, and that time they had to go to court for their first redball and Amy had had to take a second to compose herself, huddled against the wall outside the women’s bathroom. She thinks about how in the past half-year, she’s tricked herself, from time to time, into missing their easy camaraderie from before the parking lot – from _before_ – but Amy thinks now, listening to Jake’s shaky breaths and feeling the weight of his cheek on her shoulder, that it never really left. Hid itself, maybe, and did a terribly bad job of it, but;

She rubs his shoulder with her hand, the almost-stifling hot air blowing out of the ventilator on the other side of the lobby space and making her throat dry out, and the only thing that seems to be coming out of her mouth is, _It’s gonna be okay_. She doesn’t know what else to say, and it’s probably not really going to be okay anytime soon, and she thinks that there’s still a little twist in her chest at the feeling of his shirt against her fingers.

(She thinks: _This is what you’re supposed to do for your partner. You have each others’ backs_.)

(She thinks: the words, _I guess he’s your new best friend now, Santiago_ , stumbling out of his mouth, too-loud and exaggerated to mask the hurt he didn’t want to admit to.)

(She thinks: _This is what you’re supposed to do for your_ best friend.)

She lets him crash on her couch, tugging the embroidered throw pillow out from under his face when he passes out there three minutes after she helps him into the apartment and turns on the lights, depositing her own coat and purse by the door. She takes the afghan from the bedroom, the one her mother gave her when she moved out and which Jake once called, “The most boring fortress of comfort,” totally seriously, and digs through the back of her bottom drawer for the old community college t-shirt she stole from him a year ago to use as a gym shirt and never returned. She finds a pair of his sweatpants that he left there from the last time they were on a stakeout until two in the morning and he was too tired to drive back to his own apartment, remembers that they left their shared, oversized Gross Cop Sweatshirt at the precinct, and she holds the clothes in her hands for a moment, swallowing against the suddenly renewed lump in her throat. She can still see the drying spots of wetness on his cheeks, and his curls are mussed against his forehead. She drapes the afghan over him and folds the clothes on the coffee table, movements quick and very slightly hesitant. The light from her hallway is illuminating the dark living room.

She has a shift in the morning, early; he’s moved so that his face is pressed into the back of the couch, somehow managing an awkward sort of fetal position on the flower-patterned upholstery of her couch. With her coffee clutched in her hand and nearly at the door, Amy turns back to pour a tall glass of water and leave the bottle of Advil alongside it on the coffee table by the neatly-folded pile of clothing. She grabs her yellow sticky notes from the kitchen cupboard and pens the words, _Hang in there, pineapples_ , into the middle of it. Her purse is already slung over her shoulder and her coat is on, and on impulse, she adds, _It’s not your fault_ , to the bottom and sticks the paper onto the bottle of painkillers. 

(She’s gotten through the paperwork for two closed cases, the clock on the wall reading nearly two o’clock when Jake texts her a selfie of himself looking disheveled, bruises under his eyes, but with a weak smile and a thumbs up. She can see the shoulder of the college t-shirt at the bottom of the screen and texts him back the first picture of a kitten that comes up on Google images, and thinks that if there’s anything that she can trust, it’s him.)

(She doesn’t think about what that means.)

**Author's Note:**

> tfw ur not sure that your headcanons abt yakob are canonically based or ur just #projecting that struggle
> 
> anyhoops, amy santiago misses her best friend and season two is agonizing. i hope u guys enjoyed!


End file.
